Isaiah 43:2 When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overflow you… ! — Walking through the fire here is put for the severest form of trouble. You have, in the commencement of the verse, trouble described as passing through the water. This represents the overwhelming influence of trial, in which the soul is sometimes so covered that it becomes like a man sinking in the waves. "When thou goest through the rivers," — those mountain torrents which with terrific force are often sufficient to carry a man away. This expresses the force of trouble, the power with which it sometimes lifts a man from the foothold of his stability, and carries him before it. "When thou passest through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee." But going through the fire expresses not so much the overwhelming character and the upsetting power of trouble as the actual consuming and destructive power of trouble and temptation. The metaphor is more vivid, not to say more terrific, than that which is employed in the first sentence, and yet, vivid and awful though it be, it is certainly not too strong a figure to be used as the emblem of the temptations and afflictions through which the Church and people of God have been called to pass. I. THIS TERRIBLE PATHWAY. The sacramental host of God's elect has never had an easy road along which to journey. I see the fields on fire, the prairie is in a blaze, the very heavens are like a furnace, and the clouds seem rather to be made of fire than water. Across that prairie lies the pathway to heaven, beneath that blazing sky the whole Church of God must make its perpetual journey. It started at the first in fire, and its very glory at the last shall take place in the midst of the fiery passing away of all things. When first there was a Church of God on earth, in the person of Abel, it was persecuted. Since that day, what tongue can tell the sufferings of the people of God! It hath fared well with the Church when she hath been persecuted, and her pathway hath been through fire. Her feet are shod with iron and brass. She ought not to tread on paths strewn with flowers; it is her proper place to suffer. II. There is AN AWFUL DANGER. The promise of the text is based on a prophecy that follows it. The chapter tells us how God taught His people by terrible things in the past, and how He hath terrible lessons to teach them in the future. The Church has had very painful experience that persecution is a fire which does burn. How many ministers of Christ, when the day of tribulation came, forsook their flocks and fled. Again: I see iniquity raging on every side. Its flames are fanned by every wind of fashion- And fresh victims are being constantly drawn in. It spreads to every class. Not the palace nor the hovel is safe. We may give the alarm to you, young man, who are in the midst of ribald companions. I may cry "fire!" to you who are compelled to live in a house where you are perpetually tempted to evil. I may cry "fire!" to you who are marked each day, and have to bear the sneer of the ungodly, — "fire!" to you who are losing your property and suffering in the flesh, for many have perished thereby. We ought not to look upon our dangers with contempt; they are dangers, they are trials. We ought to look upon our temptations as fires. III. Here is A DOUBLE INSURANCE. It strikes me that in the second clause we have the higher gradation of a climax. "Thou shalt not be burned," to the destruction of thy life, nor even scorched to give thee the most superficial injury, for "the flames shall not kindle upon thee." Juat as when the three holy children came out of the fiery furnace it is said, "Upon their bodies the fire had no power, nor was a hair of their head singed; neither were their coats changed, nor had the smell of fire passed on them"; so the text seems to me to teach that the Christian Church under all its trials has not been consumed; but more than that — it has not lost anything by its trials. Upon the entire Church, at the last, there shall not be even the smell of fire. ( C. H. Spurgeon.) Parallel Verses KJV: When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee; and through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee: when thou walkest through the fire, thou shalt not be burned; neither shall the flame kindle upon thee. |
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